The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(84)

She broke left and I headed right, taking the long way around a bank of slot machines with the surviving mannequins hot on our heels. Her fat revolver barked again and again. I turned, feeling a shadow looming, and put the muzzle of my shotgun flush against another mannequin’s forehead before pulling the trigger. It flipped backward, tumbling neck over heels, and another two puppets clambered over its body before it even stopped twitching.

“Need some help here!” I shouted. The connecting hallway loomed ahead of us, a shadowy stretch of innocent-looking marble tiles and unlit electric wall sconces.

“Trip wire!” Bentley’s voice crackled. “Chest high!”

I hit the cold tiles with the shotgun clutched to my chest, rolling. Jennifer went down on her knees and slid under it, leaning back to fire off another wild shot. The mannequins kept coming in a relentless, silent tide of death.

“Ten feet ahead! Ankle height!” Bentley called. We jumped it as the pursuing mannequins hit the first trip wire behind us. It snapped with an audible twang. Saw blades screamed as they fired from hidden recesses in the walls, slicing the front-runners to kindling. The others didn’t hesitate, climbing over their fallen comrades without a trace of survival instinct. Jennifer turned to shoot, but her gun clicked on an empty chamber. I fired off another round, blasting a sprinting mannequin in half at the waist. One cartridge left.

The mannequins snapped the next wire. I looked back as tubes in the ceiling sprayed the horde with a watery mist. Ahead of us, a pair of wall portraits advertising long-dead lounge singers swung out from their frames, exposing a pair of nozzles angled to cover the entire hallway.

I smelled gasoline.

“Down!” I shouted, shoving Jennifer to the floor and covering her with my body just as the nozzles erupted. Gouts of flame streaked over our heads, hitting the gasoline-drenched mannequins and sending them up in a bonfire.

We crawled under the nozzles and crossed the threshold to the hotel lobby. Heavy footprints marred the dust on the floor, most leading to the main elevator beside an abandoned check-in desk. They’d blocked the front doors the crude way, stripping bed frames and desks from the guest rooms and piling them in a makeshift barricade.

Even without mouths, the mannequins screamed behind us. The wordless shrilling throbbed inside my brain as they stumbled over one another. They slammed off the hallway walls, burning and confused and dying. I pointed to the barricade.

“Can you clear enough room for us to get out?”

“Where are you going?” Jennifer said as I vaulted the check-in desk. I threw my shoulder against the door behind it, the flimsy wood cracking under the blow.

“I’ve gotta get those sprinklers working!”

Respect for an old landmark aside, I wouldn’t have minded if the tower went up in flames and took Lauren and her cult with it. It wouldn’t burn fast enough to stop them from opening the Box, though, and if we went up to confront them we’d end up trapped at the top of a raging inferno. The hotel had a fire-suppression system—the tiny sprinkler nozzles studding the lobby ceiling were proof of it—but the thick black smoke roiling from the burning hallway wasn’t doing a thing besides killing us slowly. Maybe triggering the system by hand would work.

Around the corner, in a utility room the size of a walk-in closet, I discovered why the sprinklers weren’t coming on. Metal panels sat propped against the wall, the innards of the hotel’s alarm and fire system nothing but a gutted mess of empty fuse slots and bare wires. Since Carmichael-Sterling Nevada’s pledge to renovate and reopen the Silverlode was nothing but a sham in the first place, they hadn’t put any effort into hooking up more than basic electricity.

Not like they have to worry about the place burning down either, I thought, considering they believe they’re about to enslave a couple of magic genies who can whisk them away to safety.

The fire would spread. Too fast for the hotel tower to be anything but a death trap, too slow to do our job for us. I figured I’d meet up with Jennifer in the lobby, help clear a path to the front door, and we’d figure out a plan once our escape route was in place.

I was almost to the check-in desk when a burning mannequin, shrieking and thrashing its blazing wooden arms, threw itself at me.

I jumped back, swinging my shotgun like a club. The barrel cracked across the side of its head and dropped it in the open doorway, where it flopped brokenly. The threshold caught fire. Flames spread across the plaster walls and seared them black.

“Daniel!” Jennifer shouted, running over. She stood on the opposite side of a growing wall of fire. Her hands, shimmering mirages in the heat, reached helplessly for me. It was no good. The wild flames took to the narrow hallway like a junkie to a crack vial.

“Forget it!” I said, backing off from the creeping blaze. “Can you get out through the front door?”

She nodded, looking back over her shoulder. “But what about you?”

What about me? I couldn’t think about that right now. I still had a job to do.

“I’ll find another way, don’t worry. I’ll be fine! Do me a favor: wait two minutes and send the main elevator up to the top floor. Then get out of here. Go meet up with the others. I’ll be in touch.”

She gritted her teeth, frustrated, but nodded her assent. I turned and ran.

“Don’t know if you’re keeping up on current events—” I said, one hand on my earpiece.